1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communications equipment that carries out communication within a network having plural pieces of communications equipment.
2. Related Background Art
A conventional network formed with plural pieces of communications equipment, especially a network based on the Bluetooth standard employing a frequency hopping wireless communications system forms a piconet from one master station and one to seven slave stations on a network basis. This type of network provides communications using a polling system. The polling system is such that the master station or one of the slave stations can exclusively use the network for a fixed period of time called a slot. In other words, the master station selects a slave station as its communication partner in a slot, and the selected slave station sends a response back in the next slot.
The above-mentioned conventional communication system, that is, the polling communication system, however, requires the master station to carry out polling communications with all the slave stations. As the number of slave stations in the network increases, the allocation of slot dedicated to each slave station is reduced, compared to a case where the slave stations are few in number, which reduces the communication capacity and hence the effective transmission speed of each slave station.
Further, in such a wireless communication network, since many pieces of communications equipment, especially of portable information equipment, are battery-operated, the reduction in effective transmission speed results in a falling ratio of effective communications to equipment operating time.